Memory Lane paved with art at Esperanza

Updated 12:10 pm, Friday, June 22, 2012

"Moon Bounce" by Ana Fernandez is part of the exhibit "!Queers, Presnte!" at the Esperanza.

"Moon Bounce" by Ana Fernandez is part of the exhibit "!Queers, Presnte!" at the Esperanza.

Photo: Courtesy Ana Fernandez

Memory Lane paved with art at Esperanza

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When Penelope Boyer began drawing up the roster for “¡Queers, Presente!” an exhibit of work by lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender artists, for the Esperanza Peace and Justice Center's ongoing 25th anniversary celebration, the curator — or “queerator,” as she prefers — sat down with staffers and compiled a list of all the artists who had exhibited in specifically gay and lesbian shows throughout the center's history.

There were exactly 100.

“First we were looking for artists who were still working artists. And we were looking for artists who maintained some of the core values that we recognized as shared values with the Esperanza,” Boyer says. “That could be evidence of something ethnic specific, culturally sensitive, maybe something sexually or gender empowering — some kind of boldness. We knew it when we saw it.”

“¡Queers, Presente!” is a visual walk down a memory lane — one with bumps and detours connected to the center's gay and lesbian programming including the Esperanza's eviction from its original space on North Flores Street in 1993; the defunding of the center's cultural arts programming by the city in 1997; and the subsequent lawsuit.

“When I first came in to talk about the show, I said, ‘Why are we having a queer show? People are going to ask,'” Boyer says.

Previously, Boyer, who recently earned her doctorate from the European Graduate School, curated three lesbian and gay exhibits for the center, including 2007's “¡Que Queer! San Antonio.” The exhibit combined artwork and ephemera from about 200 gay and lesbian organizations, “so it was like walking into a scrapbook,” she says.

Like that show, “¡Queers, Presente!” is intended to capture history “but more from the art point of view,” Boyer says. “And looking at the thread of art through the history of the Esperanza since 1988 ... ‘¡Que Queer!' looked at the whole city. This is really (about) how art has threaded itself through Esperanza's work.”

The lesbian and gay exhibits are among the pivotal shows in the center's history “in that these shows are what have caused their controversy and hence their growth and depth,” Boyer says.

One piece Boyer was hoping to get for the exhibition was a sculptural work by Ana Fernandez featured in “Closets: Queer Experiences” in 1993. With text that described an erotic dream about Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison in no uncertain terms, the piece helped spark the controversy that preceded the Esperanza's eviction from the rented space on Flores. Fernandez, however, no longer has the piece. Instead, the artist contributed “Moon Bounce,” a recent work from a series of paintings of neighborhood scenes.

Other works in the show include Sabra Booth's “Girl King Dreaming,” a drawing with watercolor based on the Borghese Hermaphroditus. In Greek mythology, Hermaphroditus is the deity of bisexuality and effeminacy. The piece finds a poetic echo in Philip Avila's “Odalisque,” a photographic image of a nude young man half entangled in bed sheets. Unlike the figure of Hermaphroditus, however, Avila's subject is awake, and looking directly at the viewer, a smile on his face.

Long one of the Esperanza's mainstays, it is only fitting that photographer Laura Aguilar, known for her nude self-portraits, is featured in the show. In “Three Eagles Flying,” the artist is wearing the American flag wrapped around her waist, while the Mexican flag covers her face. A thick, braided rope wraps around her neck and binds her hands together. The exhibit also includes a series of self-portraits by photographer Antonia Padilla, a transgender artist. The images are framed in plastic Polaroid cartridges.

“Her community here in San Antonio doesn't like much to be documented, she finds,” Boyer says of Padilla's work. “So, she's her own best model.”

As the exhibition was being installed, Boyer planned to emphasize the year the pieces were created to create a timeline of sorts.

“When you walk in, you'll see the year the works are made, so you'll have this constant awareness of the years between 1988 and 2012,” she says.